Karmactive Staff
Saturn has officially secured its title as the “moon king” of our solar system with the discovery of 128 new moons, bringing its total to an impressive 274. This finding, confirmed by the International Astronomical Union on March 11, 2025, puts Saturn far ahead of Jupiter, which has 95 moons.
The Hunt for New Moons
A team of astronomers from Taiwan, Canada, USA, and France made this remarkable discovery using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Their observations spanned from 2019 to 2023, employing a technique called “shift and stack” that combines multiple images to detect faint objects orbiting Saturn.
“With the knowledge that these were probably moons, and that there were likely even more waiting to be discovered, we revisited the same sky fields for three consecutive months in 2023,” said lead researcher Dr. Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica who completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia. “Sure enough, we found 128 new moons. Based on our projections, I don’t think Jupiter will ever catch up.”
Small But Significant
These newly discovered moons are quite different from Earth’s Moon. They’re classified as “irregular moons” – small, potato-shaped objects only a few kilometers across with erratic orbits.
“These moons are a few kilometers in size and are likely all fragments of a smaller number of originally captured moons that were broken apart by violent collisions, either with other Saturnian moons or with passing comets,” explained Dr. Brett Gladman, professor in the University of British Columbia’s department of Physics and Astronomy.
The moons orbit at distances between 6.5 million and 18 million miles from Saturn – much farther out than both Saturn’s famous rings (which extend to just 175,000 miles) and its major moons like Titan and Enceladus (which orbit up to two million miles away).
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Clues to Saturn’s Past
What makes this discovery particularly interesting to scientists is what it reveals about Saturn’s history. Many of the new moons are clustered in groups, suggesting they’re fragments from cosmic collisions.
Of particular interest is the Mundilfari subgroup, which includes 47 of the 128 new moons. Researchers believe this cluster may have formed from a significant collision within Saturn’s orbit as recently as 100 million years ago – relatively recent in astronomical terms.
“These studies reveal that the giant planets captured some moderate-sized moons more than 4 billion years ago as the giant planets formed, and we are now seeing moons which are mostly the fragments of those originally-captured moons,” said Dr. Gladman.
Dr. Michele Bannister, an astronomer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who wasn’t involved in the research, noted, “This is implying we could be having collisional events, and we’re seeing the shrapnel in the population of tiny moons.”
The End of a Moon Race?
Saturn and Jupiter have been locked in what astronomers call a “moon race” for years, with Saturn only taking the lead two years ago when the same research team discovered 64 additional moons.
“We don’t think that Jupiter will ever be able to reclaim that title,” said Gladman. With this latest discovery, Saturn now has nearly triple Jupiter’s moon count and more moons than all other planets in our solar system combined.
As for finding even more moons around Saturn, Dr. Ashton believes we may have reached the limits of current technology. “With current technology I don’t think we can do much better than what has already been done for moons around Saturn, Uranus and Neptune,” he said.
Though there may be thousands more tiny moons yet to be discovered, Ashton admits he’s ready for a break: “I’m a bit mooned out at the moment.”
